


Lovely Creature

by Dorkangel



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, BAMF Women, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Canon Era, Dark Magic, Demons, Fae & Fairies, Feminist Themes, Fortune Telling, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lovecraftian, Magical Realism, Maria Reynolds Defence Squad, Oh Yeah Because Feminist Lovecraft is my aesthetic, Why Did I Write This?, Women Supporting Women, proto-feminism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 19:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6623818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angelica has always been perceptive.</p><p>Had she not been on the other side of an endless ocean, she would have heard the betrayal in the heart of her brother-in-law, and been able to do something before his revelations came to pass. She would have sensed this coming. She would have stopped it, even if it meant spilling his blood across the flagstones of the house that his marriage to her sister paid for.</p><p>But she was, and she did not, and now he must deal with the blazing hellfire that is coming for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovely Creature

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the warnings. If the tags didn't warn you off, the fact that I decided to write the Schuyler Sisters as eldritch horrors probably won't. But... well, I did. I wrote the Schuyler Sisters as eldritch horrors.

Out of the three of them, Angelica has always been the most perceptive. She sees truths across crowded streets, through walls, through the souls of men. The first chords of rebellion stir in the heart of the city and summons her sisters from the halls of their father's home to sweep into New York and nudge the mood darker and bloodier towards the king.

"New ideas in the air," she calls, and it is a fanfare of triumph as beside her Eliza steals into the affections of those who would be so presumptuous as to observe them, as Peggy wrings her empty hands and wishes for the potions and wicker dolls that she is so much more accustomed to. When Burr approaches he is drunk, and so she sees no danger in lowering the shimmering glamour around them, allowing him to glimpse the truth.

"Thomas Jefferson," she informs him from behind sharpened teeth, haughty. Burr startles and stares, and Peggy giggles at the reaction, reaching out on the seventh plane of existence to brush his shoulder with a talon. A shiver runs down his spine and he does not understand why. "Is a facetious fool who needs to learn to consider in his writings the lives of people outside his sphere of educated gentlemen."

It's a good line. Shame Burr is too caught in the red of her eyes to concentrate on it.

 _Humans are so poorly built, really,_ she thinks, allowing Eliza to overhear. But it is Eliza, ever-cautious, who smiles and descends a fog over Burr's mind to hide their nature once again, saying, "I endeavour to be kind, sir. But, although my sister bears the name of one of the Lord's creatures-"

"I am _not_ one."

"We are dangerous." Peggy snarls. "Fear us."

Of course, Angelica knows what their father would have to say to their behaviour, if he turned his eye from the future for a moment. _Propriety,_ he insists, constantly. _Propriety is the way to navigate the humans' society. The way of the eighteenth century is not the way of fairytale monsters._ But he has lived too long and he has only ever adapted for survival, alone in the world: the sisters are stronger together not as women but as _Things_ , bumps in the night and long-fingered hands from the shadows, and this new country and this new century is not clever enough to believe in monsters.

And so before they heed the call echoing through the higher planes for them to return home to the world of polite dinner parties and endless balls, they shed their human forms and slip into the darkness.

(Twelve loyalists are found the next morning; their bodies are all but intact, if not for the wounds dugs deep into their ribcages, the cavities where their hearts had been. None of the men had wives or families - the sisters know, all too well, how difficult the lives of women alone in this world can be.)

 

*

 

Angelica is perceptive beyond the realms of a mortal's understanding.

This is why, when she looks into Hamilton's eyes, the part of her that is hidden beneath her dainty skirts and a pleasant face shrieks like a hellish thing to see the hunger gnawing there. He recoils minutely - not the Sight, she thinks, not that, but something close. Strong wards, cast over him with old magic by someone close to him. His mother perhaps; when she brushes against them, they have a maternal sort of feel, for the magic seems to warns her _this is my precious thing that will grow strong without a demon's bargain_. Maybe the wards have warned him of her nature, or some inherited intuition.

Or perhaps it was Burr, who has avoided every member of her family for the duration of the evening.

She feels her sisters' eyes on her, attracted by the disturbance in the lines of force that they have tracked through the house, traced underneath the carpets with chalk. The candles around the room are positioned with the lines in mind: for the humans, they induce a sort of dreamlike trance. And yet Hamilton's vision remains unclouded as he looks her straight in the eyes. Common mistake. If he was to glance out of his periphery, he might glimpse leathery wings, glowing eyes - but he is a man, and he has been born into a world where men who are Honest and Good are taught to retain eye contact.

"You strike me as unsatisfied by this affair." he informs her, and she is pleased despite the residual unease of his knowing gaze, that his lips do not linger for more than a moment upon her offered hand.

"You forget yourself." she tells him, and knows her voice is cold. _Too_ cold, her father will doubtlessly chide later. But Hamilton does not care; he shakes his head and smiles, full of passion that something inside her knows will burn too fast, too bright, consuming himself and those around him.

"No, I do not think so. You and I are alike - you seek knowledge."

So that's what he thinks. She could almost laugh.

The Thing inside her does not laugh, and she steers him politely towards Eliza, knowing that Eliza and her powers over the hearts of humans will prevail. They must, after all.

Later, she will swear that it was Hamilton's wards. That when her sister lost her mind for a moment it was because the manipulation was deflected back upon her, and that Hamilton knew what he was doing to entrance her, to take a horror from the deepest pits of hell and call the creature 'lovely'. Their father approves, of course, and Peggy and Angelica consider gathering their magics together and striking at the old man, but Eliza would never forgive them. Besides - they are strong, but he is old, and he would sense their plans.

(Eliza's magic, she will slowly realise as she twists John Church around her little finger and considers the faerie folk of London, is faultless. It is nort that Hamilton slipped through her defences. It is that she opened the gates and allowed him to.)

Angelcia utters a curse at their wedding, a mouth full of too many needle-teeth whispering the Latin underneath the mouth of pretty human pearls offering a hollow blessing. Peggy has a doll ready made with _Alexander_ scrawled over its breast in blood.

When Eliza excuses herself to fix her glamour for a moment, wine-drunk in her wedding dress, Angelica thinks to her _If he breaks your heart, we will burn his._

Her sister does not bother to reply in words.

Instead, Angelica feels her mind full of gleefully dancing flames.

 _Fear us,_ hisses Peggy again. But Eliza lets herself be carried away on the arm of a human, and the words lose some of their power.

 

*

 

It takes a month for the letter to reach her, but when Eliza invites her to America, she goes gladly. If not for the suspiciously watching eyes of Church, whose hands seem to grow tighter on his rosary every night that Angelica sleeps beside him, she would take wings immediately and fly; but he watches, and she has had enough fun using his money to send rumours about him spiralling around England, or picking off those who make comments about his "curious revolutionary wife" as they sleep, so she boards the ship and leaves.

(There are creatures in the water, who are very much not lovely. When they lean over the side of the ship to greet her, their breath is rotting meat and their voices are screams. _Send them to us_ , they beg. _Send the men so that we can feast._ This is their territory - it would be rude not to do so.)

Hamilton refuses to join them over and over, when any normal human would not be able to. He has achieved wonders here, yes, but Angelica knows it is all folly when she or Eliza or Peggy could simply wave a finger and have his wishes granted. They will not, though: she senses that New York is at peace, and turns her inner eye on matters closer to home.

Their father's house, when they arrive, still has the ley lines marked.

Eliza's children all, without exception, hesitate before they unknowingly cross one. Eliza's _human_ children, with their neat hair and their little dresses and breeches and the way they chase each other, all innocence.

"They don't know," shrugs her sister. "They are not fully mortal. But they aren't like us, and they're happy."

Angelica, perceptive as ever, decides after a little observation that it is not so. Eliza's _eldest_ is happy, all of nine years old and the king of the world. His grandfather scoops him under his wing and shows him the crystal ball and the tarot cards and even the broken eggshells of monsters that she supposes a modern child would call dragons. Philip, dutifully, pretends that they do not speak to him. Just a game, he laughs, and hurries to terrorise his siblings with his wooden sword and the will that he has inherited from Hamilton, the will of iron.

The teachers who laud him at school don't even see the boy's resolve, for he has inherited Eliza's preternatural charisma. That is not Angelica's concern. Her concern is not even the way that she finds him shaking in the study one night, his little eyes red-rimmed and glowing slightly.

( _I will die_ , he sobs into her arms as she lifts him towards the bed he should have been asleep in hours ago. His mother is out hunting, and Angelica is restless to join her, so she wilfully ignores the way he says, _I- I saw, in ten years, and he was older than me and he shot on seven, Auntie Angelica, I'm scared_ , scrubs all the divination he has learned from his mind. When she tells her father sternly to stop the boy's instruction, he calmly does. The women of their family have always been stronger.)

No, Angelica's attention in drawn to the little waif of whom she is the namesake. The girl, seven years old, all but vibrates with magic. Every now and again Angelica catches her spinning within the pentagrams that the carpets have concealed.

"Must I wear a gown?" she moans to her mother one day. Angelica laughs a little, remembering the fury with which she had realised the roles that the humans insist on assigning her simply by virtue of the sex of the form she wears.

It is not her oppression that little Angelica is yet bothered by. Instead, both women freeze when she sighs out, "It hurts the wings, mama."

The girl's muscles, suddenly far more corded than that of a child barely out of a crib, tense infinitesimally. No one but Angelica would ever notice.

"Oh," she breathes, her bottom lip trembling. "I am not meant to say."

Cautiously, and knowing that now is the right time, Angelica raises one hand, allows the tip of her claw to pierce the glamour and peel a piece of it away.

Little Angie brings up one hand to mirror, and although the girl’s is humanly childish and pudgy she seems to see no different. There is a kind of delight runs viscerally through her and Eliza simultaneously, as all of her senses rejoice and say to her _do not look to the sons but to the daughters. The child is far more your sister’s progeny than her father’s._

“I thought that it must have been a very special secret.” smiles little Angelica, and the older Angelica realises now that the girl has always had way of more baring her teeth than smiling, as though her mouth considers itself to be far wider and sharper than it would appear to be. “Because of all the hiding.”

 _No need for that with your mama and your auntie,_ Eliza tells her softly, and neither Angelica really bothers to acknowledge that she has not spoken out loud. Her eyes have faded back to how they were meant to be, slitted pupils bisecting electric blue like the heart of a lightening strike.

“We share a name, we share a nature.” Angelica says, reaching out to displace the veil a little further, and thinks so strongly on the power of names, of the truth that she can sense and almost see, so that when Eliza pulls a pin from her daughter’s hair it tumbles down around black wings.

“Do as we do, little one.”

(The next day, when the farmer who lives nearby goes to seek his sheep and finds them torn and bloodied, as though by a wolf, he curses in anger at the little girl standing at the fence and watching coolly. “Wild thing!” he shouts, as her namesake takes her hand. “Consciousless beast!”)

( _Look not at the remains of the old meal,_ the aunt says, directing the girl’s gaze from the sheep to the farmer. _Look to the next one._ )

“Your daughters will be born into power.” Angelica promises her sister before she leaves, resting a hand on her once-again pregnant belly. Little Angie nods solemnly – Phillip shivers in foreboding, and their father sighs.

 

*

 

Angelica has always been perceptive.

Had she not been on the other side of an endless ocean, she would have heard the betrayal in the heart of her brother-in-law, and been able to do something before his revelations came to pass. She would have sensed this coming. She would have stopped it, even if it meant spilling his blood across the flagstones of the house that his marriage to her sister paid for.

But she was, and she did not, and now it is too late.

From the moment Angelica disembarks the ship (for the last time, she promises herself, for the thought of returning to London all of sudden seems to scorch at the cavity where her soul should be) she can hear a howling anguish that echoes through the city streets and rings painfully in the spaces between Angelica’s mortal guise and her true self.

It is chance that she encounter Hamilton. His colleagues, his enemies, those he would have doubtlessly called friends, they ridicule him as he passes, the confession of his sin bold and blatant upon the pamphlets in their hands.

_Good._

He will suffer far more than humiliation at the hands of the sisters.

Peggy is tearing towards the city with every passing second, a potion concocted of water from a hurricane and cursed thistle bearing her upon its fury. Angelica rushes through the streets. Somewhere, hidden away in her nice townhouse like a princess in a tower, Eliza is screaming.

“Angelica,” he calls after her, desperately. “Please, you at least must understand, my attempt to preserve my name-”

She ignores him, his pathetic attempts to appeal to the good nature that she does not possess, but when he grabs at her sleeve as a drowning man might she whirls on him with all the fury of a titan. The hiss that escapes her lips is more feline than human.

“Keeps your hands to yourself, Alexander. Or have you not learned what kind of damage you are apt to do with them?”

The words bite, and he flinches, but he holds her eyes with his own and does not see the writhing beast that snaps at him from the corner of his vision.

“I was trying to protect my legacy.” he pleads, and she wants to scream at the fact that the hexes that she hurls at him as she strides away fall away in the face of his wards.

 _Damn his legacy_ , she thinks bitterly. He is lucky to be so much as alive, to have survived an encounter with one of the Schuyler sisters in a rage – and he thinks of his _legacy_?

It makes a stupid amount of sense. This embarrassment will pass: he will be outlasted by what he has built no matter what anyone does to him now, and as women what can Eliza and Angelica do but raise the man’s children? Even as creatures, they are not feared as anything but unnamed whispers in the dark, as claw marks on cadavers. Oh, Angelica knows all too well that he will be remembered. And that she most likely will not. Over that, she is powerless.

But powerless does not mean declawed.

“They will learn to be afraid of us again.” Peggy is growling when Angelica sweeps into around Eliza’s bedchamber. “Damn Father’s caution – we will darken the sky with thunder.”

Little Angie – grown by two years now, but still young yet – narrows her eyes in agreement, and lightning crackles between her taloned hand, the same shade as her eyes. The girl is perched on the edge of the bed where her mother is curled, stricken with grief, and she has ripped great holes in her dress to make way for her wings. Angelica senses the reasoning (The fabric is expensive. Hamilton is the one who will have to pay for a new one.) and approves thoroughly.

Eliza has another daughter now too, but the child is a babe. Too young to understand that the funny meaty things around her are people, and that she must pretend to be like them: too young to deny her identity, because she does not realise she has one.

“Burn.” whispers Eliza, the first thing she has said since she wailed. “We will burn him.”

Her face is half-buried in the pillows. There are no tears.

Peggy, grimly, reaches into her corset and withdraws the old wicker doll, her elegant and well-practiced handwriting condemning the thing, tying it to soul of a treacherous husband. Little Angelica (Who surely, surely must feel some sympathy for the man who has raised her? Or was he so absent that she has no compunctions on the matter of rallying against him? Or does Eliza’s influence extend so powerfully over her child that Angie’s personal opinions are inconsequential) watches curiously. There are many things that she does not yet know, and this, this conventional witchcraft that even a human woman could learn, is new to her.

Angelica does not lie to herself: desire to see the thing shrivel up and turn to ash washes over her like a tide. But that, her instincts tell her, would be far from the worst thing they could do to Hamilton – his legacy, after all, his damned legacy, is the reason he has hurt their Eliza.

“No.”

Her sisters turn to her, waiting. She grins.

“I have a better idea.”

 

*

 

The blazing hellfire does not so much as graze his skin. The long-gone love of a mother cradles him in its grip and keeps him safe from the flames no matter how much Angelica tries to urge them towards him: as the magic resists, the crackling and spitting whispers to her _I have carried him to the eye of a hurricane. Arcane fire is nothing to me_.

Eliza’s children, were they here – the sisters sent them away, back up to the Schuyler house where this whole mess began – would be untouched too, but that would be deliberate. Hamilton’s pretty things alone are alight, all the words he has ever poured onto paper, all the legislature he has ever drafted and the love-letters he has sent. It is piled in his study, and the sisters stand around the bonfire with their hands linked and the gentle caress of the flames turning their gowns to cinders.

When he sees it, he falls to his knees. Sorrow, yes, but not horror. Angelica senses that he sees very little of the ritual but the letters and the sisters watching them burn – this was not enough to break him. Something, nearing with every second, will be; but not this.

(It wasn’t about him, really. It was about Eliza.)

“You forfeit your right to my love.” Eliza orders him, enjoying that they stand over him, in unity, and he is on the ground. “You need not recall this – but from now, you _will_ respect me.”

“And you will fear us,” Peggy promises. “For if you touch her again, we will find a way around your protection.”

 

*

 

When she is confident that Eliza will be okay and that Alexander will not be fool enough to break the rules they have enforce upon him, Angelica shrouds herself in darkness on every plane but the highest and hunts through the streets for the girl that Hamilton found so preferable to his own wife.

It takes nearly four hours to find her. _She has gone into hiding perhaps because of the pamphlet_ , Angelica thinks, and then discards the idea. It feels wrong – increasingly, the entire situation feels wrong, unease settling in her bones as she alights on the roof of a poor building not far from the Hamilton house. Audibly even to human ears there is the clamour of furious shouting from inside.

And then the harsh, sudden sound of skin against skin, and a cry of pain.

She snarls, diving inside through a window to watch, still hidden from human sight, some inconsequential fool hurling the girl bodily into a mere closet of a room. He slams the door behind himself and a lock snaps shut: the girl does not seem to dare to protest, collapsing on the bed and doing her best to sob quietly – there is a crib in the corner, and a little toddler pretending to sleep.

This was not the fault of the girl: even without her instincts, Angelica would know that. But appearing from the shadows as a creature from hell will not help her, and so she slips away to where the husband is poring over papers – forged – requesting reimbursement for lost wages during the war. Unnoticed, Angelica bites the pad of her thumb and lets a drop of blood fall into the liquor in his cup, waits until he has finished convulsing and foaming at the mouth from her poison, then unlocks the door of the bedchamber and lets four words form in the mind of the girl, the barest bones of a plan.

_Run. Take your chance._

(The girl is wise, and does so quickly. When Angelica casts around for her the next month, she senses no Maria Reynolds at all; that girl is gone, melted away in the past of tragically widowed Maria Lewis and her sweet daughter, Susan.)

 

*

 

(When Hamilton does break, Angelica will be watching. The life of his son will fade as the boy lays in his arms, murdered, and now matter how Eliza chants to ease the pain they will be too late. She will hear little Angelica’s heart shatter into tiny pieces for her brother and go to prevent the girl from laying spells and plagues on the Eakers – but not before she sees Alexander’s wards melt off him one by one with grief. _He will beg Eliza’s forgiveness_ , she knows, and is calm.)

(Eliza will accept the plea. But no matter how sincere he is, Angelica won’t.)

(When the time comes, when Burr stands furious and considers letting a bullet fly to the heart of his best friend, Hamilton will be unprotected and she and Peggy will nudge his feelings to empathy and weariness.)

(Strange, how little influence it takes to seal a man’s doom.)

**Author's Note:**

> *chants ritually* feminist lovecraft feminist lovecraft feminist lovecraft feminist lovecraft feminist lovecraft feminist lovecraft


End file.
